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Monday, September 21, 2015

The KDKA Story - In the Beginning

We
pick up the long and interesting story of the Westinghouse shortwave station
with four consecutive callsigns, KDKA-W8XK-WPIT-WBOS, in the year 1919. World War 1 was over, the devastated nations
in Europe were beginning to re-assemble themselves into some form of normalcy,
and radio was poised and almost ready to begin to assert itself as a powerful
worldwide medium of entertainment and information.

Right at 8 pm on Friday evening
October 17, 1919, just 2½weeks after the ban against all
amateur and experimental radio transmissions in the United States was lifted,
Frank Conrad began a two hour program of recorded music over his amateur
station 8XK in Wilkinsburg Pennsylvania.
The low power longwave transmitter was installed on the 2nd
floor above the family garage next to his home on the corner of Penn Avenue and
Peebles Street in Wilkinsburg.

The antenna wires stretched between
two wooden poles, one placed at the edge of the garage and the other at the
back corner of the family property. Also
stretching between these two wooden poles was a set of earth wires acting as a
counterpoise, a dozen feet above the ground.

Thus began a spasmodic series of
entertainment programs, consisting of live and recorded music, together with
announcements and items of information that were heard not only in the
Pittsburgh area, but further afield, wherever there was an amateur radio
operator tuning cross the bands on his untidy home made receiver. Informal reception reports came in by phone,
by mail, and by wireless, and many of them were answered in kind.

A few months later, early in the
following year 1920, Fred Conroy at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in
Pittsburgh took the institute’s experimental radio transmitter 8XC
to the Westinghouse factory at East Pittsburgh, and there he gave a
demonstration of radio transmission and reception to their top officials. At the time, the 8XC license was held by the
Carnegie Institute of Technology, though quite soon afterwards the license
lapsed, and the call was re-issued to an amateur experimenter in Cleveland
Ohio.

Due to the local interest that was
developed by the Conrad 8XK entertainment and information broadcasts, the
Joseph Horne Department Store in Pittsburgh had a local radiotrician build a
few sets which were advertised in the local newspaper for sale in the
store. Westinghouse Vice President Harry
Davis recognized the sales potential, and he called a conference of
Westinghouse officials, including Frank Conrad, to discuss the possibility of
establishing a radio broadcasting station in their factory complex. That was in September 1920, and they soon set
a target date for the launching of the new radio broadcasting station at the
time of the presidential elections scheduled for November 2.

Westinghouse already held a wireless
station license, just recently received, for a communication station under the
callsign KDKA. This license gave
approval for Morse Code communication between the East Pittsburgh factory and
other interstate Westinghouse facilities.

A wooden shack was
constructed on the roof of factory Building K at East Pittsburgh, eight stories
above ground level, and a new 100 watt mediumwave transmitter was built and set
in a corner of the room. The single wire
antenna was stretched between Building K and a nearby chimney stack.

Test broadcasts were
radiated from the new radio transmitter a few days in advance of the inaugural
election day broadcast and these were noted on 550 meters, equivalent to 545
kHz at the low end of the now recognized mediumwave band. The Pittsburgh Gazette Times announced in
their daily newspaper on October 24 that the new Westinghouse radio
broadcasting station would be inaugurated on Election Day, eight days later.

In the meantime, Westinghouse had
submitted a license request to the regional office of the Department of
Commerce in Detroit for approval to broadcast the election returns on November
2. However, because of the close
proximity of time, Westinghouse received an official phone call that gave them
approval to broadcast under the special and temporary amateur callsign
8ZZ. Apparently the paper work did not
follow, and the Department of Commerce (intentionally or inadvertently?)
re-issued the call 8ZZ quite soon to an amateur radio operator in
Michigan.

The inaugural broadcast
from the new radio broadcasting station 8ZZ, began at 6:00 pm on Election Day,
Tuesday November 2, 1920. It was a stormy
almost wintry night, and four men crouched over their equipment in the
hurriedly erected wooden hut on top of the eight storied K Building in the
Westinghouse factory complex at East Pittsburgh, in the American state of
Pennsylvania.

As the progressive news came in by
voice over the phone from a reporter in the newspaper office at the Pittsburgh
Gazette Times, it was written down by R. S. McLelland and John Frazier, and it
was then handed to Leo Rosenburg who read the information into the 8ZZ microphone. Caring for the operation of the technical
equipment was radiotrician Donald Little.

In between the snippets of election
news, two banjo players strummed away to provide an interlude of musical
entertainment. Then too, Announcer
Rosenburg made frequent requests for reception reports on the transmissions
from the new station, and these reports came in from lots of locations within
North America, and even from a ship at sea.

And where was Frank Conrad on the
occasion of the inaugural transmission; he who had designed and built the
equipment? He was at home 5 miles away,
ready to use his own low powered longwave transmitter 8XK in the room above the
garage as a back up unit if the main transmitter on top of the Westinghouse K
Building should malfunction.

However, all went well, and 8ZZ
performed admirably. In fact, it stayed
on the air all that night right up until noon next day with the broadcast of
election news, even though the loser, Governor James Cox, had already conceded
victory to the new President Warren Harding.

One of the Westinghouse executives,
Dr. L. W. Chubb, Manager of the Radio Engineering Department, installed a
receiver with two loud speakers in the main community room at the Edgewood
Club, some 4 miles distant from the transmitter location. The large crowd who had gathered for the
Election Day broadcast included many senior Westinghouse executives and their
wives. It is estimated that the total
audience tuned in to station 8ZZ for their election results numbered anywhere
up to a thousand.

Following the successful
inauguration of the new radio broadcasting station at the Westinghouse factory
at East Pittsburgh, the station adopted a regular daily schedule with
entertainment and information programs each evening, beginning usually around
6:00 pm. The original temporary
mediumwave callsign 8ZZ was quite soon replaced by the more familiar KDKA a day
or two later. And that’s
our story on another occasion here in Wavescan.